OpenStack Summit convenes in Boston

Twice a year the OpenStack community gathers for its Summit in which users, vendors and the programmers that build the open source IaaS cloud computing software talk about OpenStack’s progress and plan future releases. This week than 5,000 attendees from 63 countries descended on Boston and more than 100 sponsoring companies released myriad products and services. Here are some of the highlights.

OpenStack Foundation

OpenStack user snapshot

OpenStack is a set of open source projects that can be used either together or independently to build an IaaS cloud. Every six months the OpenStack Foundation surveys its users and since last fall, the Foundation registered a 44% increase in the number of OpenStack deployments. OpenStack now runs more than 5 million cores in production. This year’s survey covered more than 600 OpenStack clouds, about 60% are considered private cloud or hosted private cloud, while 30% are public clouds. IT users remain the most popular users, followed by telecommunications companies. About one-third of OpenStack users work at companies with more than 10,000 employees. Thirty-seven percent of OpenStack clouds have more than 1,000 cores and 16% have more than 1 PB of storage.

OpenStack’s emerging use cases

Use cases for OpenStack continue to evolve. One key theme at this year’s Summit is the idea of using bits and pieces of OpenStack as independent projects, instead of as a monolithic platform. OpenStack is made up of a compute project (Nova), storage (Cinder and Swift), networking (Neutron) and many others. Customers are able to use OpenStack with all of these components, or just some of them. For example, you could deploy the Kubernetes container management platform with a Cinder storage underlay and not use Nova. Another trend is the use of OpenStack with bare metal servers and containers and for machine learning workloads. Telecommunications companies are increasingly using OpenStack for network function virtualization (NFV).

Brandon Butler

Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11

When you think of open source software, you think of Red Hat. Red Hat’s distribution of OpenStack is the most popular in the community and this week the company released Red Hat OpenStack Platform 11. It includes Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and its CloudForms management platform. A key improvement is to make upgrades between versions easier and it includes new features such as VLAN-aware virtual machines.

Rackspace OpenStack Private Cloud with Dell-EMC

Two big names in the OpenStack ecosystem are coming together this week as Rackspace and Dell-EMC are partnering. Rackspace will deliver its OpenStack cloud software on Dell-EMC hardware and offer it to customers as a private-cloud as a service. The news is meant to broaden Rackspace’s appeal to Dell-EMC customers, and give Dell-EMC customers more options to deploy OpenStack in a variety of options (private cloud, hosted private cloud).

Brandon Butler

Juniper’s Contrail SDN Controller now supports containers

Juniper boasts that its software defined networking controller is the most popular option for OpenStack users, according to the Foundation’s survey. This week Juniper introduced new support in Contrail for containers and integration with Kubernetes, the container management platform. Meanwhile, Juniper is also in the process of integrating cloud software management tooling from AppFormix (which Juniper bought in late 2016) into its product line.

Brandon Butler

NetApp StorageGRID Webscale product

NetApp this week released the latest version of its Storage Grid Webscale product line, which is an object-storage service that can be used in OpenStack cloud deployments. The latest release includes support for Docker containers and the ability to install the storage on bare metal servers; better multi-tenant control; and new integrations with OpenStack’s identity management service named Keystone.

OpenStack Foundation

Canonical new Italian OpenStack cloud

Ubuntu is the most popular operating system used in OpenStack clouds, according to the Foundation’s user survey. At the Summit in Boston this week Ubuntu’s makers Canonical announced a new large-scale OpenStack deployment. GARR is a large Italian research and education consortium with 4 million users across 1,200 research sites. It’s built a federated OpenStack cloud across five sites in Europe. GARR says it’s automated the OpenStack management and can now stand up new OpenStack clouds at research sites in as little as 20 minutes.

OpenStack Foundation

Mirantis-Fujitsu partnership

Mirantis is one of the largest pure-play OpenStack integrators and this week it announced a new big partnership with Fujitsu that will integrate the Mirantis Cloud Platform into Fujitsu’s hardware, software and support sales. Fujitsu will also roll out a new OpenStack based public cloud that will first open in Japan, but will then be rolled out throughout the world.